Dr James Baker gave a presentation on moving from digital images to digital research. He discussed how digitization has allowed scholars to analyze large collections of texts in new ways using computational tools. Researchers can now study patterns in texts across huge corpora in a way that was previously impossible. Baker also presented examples showing how textual analysis and densitometry of fingerprints in manuscripts' margins can provide new insights into how texts were used and valued historically.

1. From Digital Images
to Digital Research
Dr James Baker
Curator, Digital Research
@j_w_baker

2. www.bl.uk 2
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Text attribution Greg Wilson, Two Solitudes, SPLASH 2013 (29 October 2013)
http://www.slideshare.net/gvwilson/splash-2013
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More than resource discovery…
“The emergence of the new
digital humanities isn’t an
isolated academic
phenomenon. The
institutional and
disciplinary changes are
part of a larger cultural
shift, inside and outside the
academy, a rapid cycle of
emergence and convergence
in technology and culture”
Steven E Jones, Emergence of
the Digital Humanities (2014)

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“Literary scholars and historians have in the past been limited in their
analyses of print culture by the constraints of physical archives and human
capacity. A lone scholar cannot read, much less make sense
of, millions of newspaper pages. With the aid of computational
linguistics tools and digitized corpora, however, we are working toward a
large-scale, systemic understanding of how texts were valued and
transmitted during this period”
David A. Smith, Ryan Cordell, and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, ‘Infectious
Texts: Modeling Text Reuse in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers’ (2013)
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dasmith/infect-bighum-2013.pdf

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‘Early users of medieval books of
hours and prayer books left signs of
their reading in the form of fingerprints
in the margins. The darkness of
their fingerprints correlates
to the intensity of their use
and handling. A densitometer -- a
machine that measures the darkness
of a reflecting surface -- can reveal
which texts a reader favored.’
Kathryn M. Rudy, ‘Dirty Books:
Quantifying Patterns of Use in
Medieval Manuscripts Using a
Densitometer’, Journal of Historians
of Nederlandish Art (2010)

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discipline
camp and
camps sentence

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(c) Associated Newspapers Ltd. / Solo
Syndication, British Cartoon Archive,
University of Kent, Mac [Stan McMurtry],
Daily Mail, 13 July 1973.
Request
Problem
Processing
Analysis
Results

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Left: instances of the words 'strikes’ and ‘unions’ for titles and any
associated text in date order between 1960 and 1980.
Right: instances of the words ‘strikes’ and ‘unions’ for titles only in date order
between 1960 and 1980.
.

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Piet Mondrian vs. Mark Rothko
X-axis: brightness mean
Y-axis: saturation mean
(c) Lev Manovich, 2010

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‘Overall, the identity of the
data creator is less
important than expected
[...] Content found on online sites
is tested against a set of finely-
tuned ideas about the normal
range of documents rather than
the authority of the digitiser’
Mia Ridge, 'Early PhD findings:
Exploring historians' resistance
to crowdsourced resources' (19
March 2014)

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Michael Hancher: blog, exercise

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‘[T]he very phrase ‘digital history’
suggests separateness from, or
the existence of, ‘non-digital’ historical
practice. This seems highly
problematic though. Both the idea
that ‘digital history’ constitutes a specific
sub-discipline, existing next to other
historical sub-disciplines such as
cultural, social, political or gender
history, as well as the idea that it should
essentially be seen as an auxiliary
science of history, feed into the myth
that historical practice in
general can be uncoupled from
technological, and thus
methodological, developments and that
going digital is a choice, which, I cannot
emphasise strongly enough, it is not.’
Gerben Zaagsma, ‘On Digital
History’, BMGN - Low Countries
Historical Review 128:4 (2013)

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Thank you!
@j_w_baker
james.baker@bl.uk
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
Slides: http://slidesha.re/1juAjUf
Notes: http://bit.ly/1lDW3d9